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A Pregnancy Scare

Pregnant women get all types of tests these days, as I'm sure you all know. Genetic tests, tests that examine the amniotic fluid, tests that look for diseases like diabetes in the mother. Sometimes I think that the whole of pregnancy, medically speaking, is just a giant exercise in monitoring. A lot of times there's nothing they can actually do if they find something wrong; but because people can know things, it's impossible to resist finding out.

So the other day we got a call from the doctor’s office. The nurse’s voice was efficient on the phone. “Ms. Blossoms, this is Dr. J---‘s office calling. Please call us back when you can.” Not much to get worried about. But still, something seemed odd straightaway. Something slightly strained in the nurse’s voice. And the idea that the doctor’s office had never called us before. We’d always had to call them.

We’d forgotten that we’d even gotten this last battery of tests done — or at least that we hadn't heard back about the results. It'd become hard to keep track of all the diagnostics. It wasn’t until Blossoms returned the call that we remembered someone saying, “We’ll call you if anything shows up in the results.” Blossoms was restrained on the phone. Said a few yes’s, asked what a few things meant. Then she hung up. There was a chance there was a problem.

It was a chance. A sliver of probability that this test had shown something. And even within that sliver, the probability of it actually being something truly bad was another, smaller sliver. (I’m not going to get into what the tests were about right now, in order to respect Blossoms’ privacy, and because it physically makes me nauseous to type it.) We’d go the next day and get a further test that would tell us exactly what the situation was.

For me, that afternoon and the next day and the days before the results came in — the taxi ride to the doctor’s office through clear, mild sunlight; the trip to the grocery store afterward, the meetings at work that seemed to be taking place at the far end of the solar system — all that time suffused with some kind of nerve toxin. Everything was acutely painful - the air I breathed, the faces of the people I saw on the street. I couldn’t bear to think about the small, beating heart of the baby inside of Blossoms. And everywhere, healthy, happy families appeared, like land-mines, seemingly placed to remind me that I was either going to be very lucky or very unlucky.

The fact is I've been around long enough to know that lots of really awful, difficult things happen to people who don't deserve it. There seems in some moments almost that there are too many awful things to go around — and then at other times that you are the only one teetering on that knife's edge. Makes you wonder how many people on the street corner are shouldering those burdens.

The tests came back negative. Everything was fine. But I was a mess. I cried seventeen times over the next two days. At almost anything. It didn’t even have to be sad, it only had to be emotional.

But something changed in me. The stakes of this whole endeavor became extremely real to me. I realized exactly what a costly gamble having a child is, what a costly gamble it is to love anything that much.

Do you guys know what I'm talking about?

Photo: iStock

For something lighter, tell us if you would rather have a boy or a girl.